HYPERFIXATIONS GOT ME BAD Y'ALL

They fired her.

Remembrance is eternity. Eternity in remembrance.

May it enjoy greener pastures and eat many dandelions...

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Now, about the piece.

I think it’s by far the best-looking thing I’ve done yet, and I learned so much while making it that I really feel like I could talk about it for hours on end.

What I think turned out well: The hair and the clouds.

Also, after scrapping so many works, it feels great to finally see something through from beginning to end!

What sucks: Everything else. -_-

(Only half-joking... haha...)

The first major problem I noticed was the ungodly amount of time it took me to finish. I say that, but really over the two weeks it took, I probably spent about 24 hours on it. The point is, because of my lack of fundamentals, brushstroke efficiency, and color theory, what took me this long could’ve been done much faster, so that's that.

The hardest part by far was the hands and shoes. For the shoes, I just couldn’t get anything that looked like the originals. After nearly burning out, I decided to just do whatever I wanted. They turned out… okay, I guess, even if they don’t make any sense (looking at you, big shiny reflection on the right boot!). As for the hands, let’s just say I went through at least five different versions of the left arm alone. It was rough... and the result ended up pretty “meh.” but ok.

For the background, apart from the clouds (which are honestly the thing I’m most proud of right now) I only had a rough outline in the sketch. By the time I got to it, after suffering through things like the shoes, my patience was running low. It shows most in the grass: at first, I was painting each blade individually, until I realized I’d lose my mind before even getting halfway done. So I sampled a batch of strokes and copy-pasted them with transform. It looked terrible, and I had to redo everything anyway—but at least it gave me an okay base to work from. (Lesson learned!)

On a positive note, this piece gave me a breakthrough about what I want to focus on going forward as an artist.

Until now, my only goal was basically “do whatever I want, and keep improving so my work looks less terrible” (still working on that!). But I remembered how, as a kid, I was deeply moved by a Monet painting in a museum. My love for his work, and Impressionism in general, has only grown since then.

While working on the clouds, I paused and realized: this was what touched me so much in Monet’s paintings the colors. Specifically, the resonance I feel when looking at the way those colors interact. As someone who doesn’t often feel much from life, that resonance means a lot to me. It’s hard to put into words, but if you get it, you get it.

So now, I finally have something concrete to strive toward: I want my colors to vibrate! 

I want to emulate the feelings I get when I look at Impressionist paintings.

(And I’m nowhere near achieving that yet, lol.)

Anyway, if you read through all this rambling, I hope you enjoyed looking at the piece, and I wish you a wonderful day!